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| Home | Eberhard Fuhr Story
Telling the Whole Story of World War II Internment
By Lynda Lin, Assistant Editor In the small dusty town of Crystal City, Texas the ruins tell the unlikely story of a former civilization. Concrete foundations and the hollow remains of a swimming pool whisper tales of its former life as a World War II internment camp. But some feel the historical narrative is incomplete. Eberhardt Fuhr was 17 years old when two U.S. officials came to his high school in Cincinnati to arrest him in front of his friends. He was taken to Crystal City, a vast "family" internment camp 120 miles south of San Antonio, where he lived with his family for over four years. Like his fellow Japanese American internees, Fuhr's crime was his ethnicity. Crystal City marker"It was a time of abrogated human and civil rights," said Fuhr, 82. "A subscription to a German magazine usually lead to jail." About 15,000 Germans and German Americans were interned in the U.S. during WWII under suspicion of being Nazi sympathizers. At Crystal City, German Americans made up the second largest ethnic community, but are largely forgotten in historical context. Even a historical marker at the former entrance of the camp refers only to the injustice inflicted against JAs. Fuhr feels a certain amount of resentment, but he takes every opportunity to talk about his experience. "I just got back from speaking to some children at a school in Chinatown," said Fuhr, who lives in Palatine, Illinois. Among some other memorabilia, he brought his arrest warrant, passport and other legal documents to "present a factual situation." about his little known history.
At its peak, Crystal City was a bustling mini city with diversity: JAs, German Americans, Germans from Latin America, Italian Americans and Japanese Latin Americans coexisted in a makeshift community. But its idyllic name belied its desolate location where mesquite trees offered the only reprieve from harsh summer heat. Unlike the main 10 JA internment camps, Crystal City housed alien enemies and their families. Often most of those held in camps like Crystal City were arrested under the Alien Enemy Act for simply being community leaders or martial arts instructors. Many were held without formal trials. Fuhr's parents were arrested and taken away while he was working at a North Carolina boy's camp. When he arrived at Crystal City in July 1943, the 17-year-old had not seen his parents in a year. The camp was made up of family units that afforded some vestiges of privacy over communal life. It also gave Fuhr his first encounter with JAs. "It was strange to hear the language. It was stranger to hear the Japanese music," he said. At Crystal City there were no walls separating ethnic groups, but each communities' experiences was carefully delineated. German Americans lived on one side while JAs lived on the other. There was one general high school, as well as a German and a Japanese school. "The German Americans lived in their own side of the camp. The Japanese Americans stuck to their own group," said Sumi Shimatsu, a Nisei who lived at Crystal City for two years. "We got along, but we didn't go out of our way to be friends with them." But all barriers fell away when it came to sports. The Japanese team played the German and Latin American team in softball, baseball and eventually soccer. "It was a friendly rivalry," said Fuhr. "They are very big! It made it awfully tough for us to beat them," said George Kodama, 79, with a laugh. "We were all trying to grow up in a place where we didn't know where we were going."
When the fences came down, lives further diverged. Some repatriated to the countries that were now foreign while others struggled to reestablish their homes and reconcile with the past. "I didn't talk a lot about it until I retired," said Fuhr about his internment. "Back then I always had the feeling that I couldn't go for a job that required security clearance." He had to wait seven years after his release from Crystal City in order to be applicable for U.S. citizenship, but he couldn't shake the feeling that he was never qualified for a job. Unlike the JA community, which actively organizes internment camp reunions, Fuhr only keeps in touch with a spattering of former German American internees. Life after internment wasn't as smooth for German American internees as JAs, said Shimatsu, who had just returned from a Crystal City reunion in Las Vegas. "Their anger is much stronger." It's more a feeling of resentment, said Fuhr for being left out of history despite their shared experiences. In 1988, JAs won the long-fought battle for an apology from the U.S. government and redress, while the narratives of other ethnic communities languished in obscurity. "The German experience is not well-known, because myths were spread by so-called scholars, who knew little or nothing of the truth of internment," said Arthur D. Jacobs, a retired major of the U.S. Air Force and researcher of WWII internment history. Fuhr attributes the lack of awareness to the lack of a coalition.
A growing number of campaigning German Americans are now asking for recognition from the American government for their injustice. The Wartime Treatment Study Act, which seeks to establish a commission to review the facts surrounding injustices suffered by European Americans, European Latin Americans, and European refugees during WWII, is currently up for debate in Congress. And a "bus-eum" exhibit sponsored by Traces, a non-profit educational organization, allows visitors to learn about the German American internment experience in a converted mobile museum with its own 21-seat theater. "This history of U.S. internment cannot be limited to the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II," said Grace Shimizu of Campaign for Justice, an advocacy group working for redress for Japanese Latin Americans. "If we want to look to our past to draw lessons for today, we need history that is based on truth and accuracy. What is at stake is the defense of our Constitution, application of international human rights to the U.S., and upholding rule of law and our democratic process." Mending the divide between JAs and other former internees is simple, some argue. "The divide can easily be mended first by including all civilian victims of internment in discussions, in meetings, in bills, and in proposals on the subject of internment and second by insisting that our textbooks be corrected, followed by an insistence that the social studies curriculum of our schools be required to include a section on the internment of German Americans," said Jacobs. JACL National President Larry Oda was born in Crystal City in 1945 and although he has no memory of the desolate camp, he remembers his mother talking about the separate areas for the JAs, JLAs and Germans.
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